Sticks and stones: colonialism and Zanzibari housing

Abstract

Abstract It has become commonplace for scholars to speak of cities, especially colonial cities, as texts in which power relations are embedded. This article presents the findings of six years' research, including archival research, interviewing and fieldwork on the planning and development of Zanzibar. I concentrate on house-building and domestic environments in the city's historic African neighbourhoods, known as Ngʼambo, or the ‘Other Side’. Struggles for cultural hegemony are evident in struggles over Zanzibar's built environment during the twentieth century. The focus is on how the legal language defining house types and establishing building codes, developed under colonialism, became a tactical instrument of the powerful in asserting spatial dominance. Yet the enforcement of the building code often showed the limits of colonial and local elite attempts at hegemony, especially at the end of the colonial era. Throughout the century, the words for African traditional housing and neighbourhood types in Zanzibar have betrayed the disdain with which the powerful have viewed them. There is, however, an order and plan to the ‘unplanned building’ which still dominates the city.

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